Avatar: Warlords
by Saika Shadow
Summary: War rewards neither skill nor daring. It is not a trial of mettle, nor the measure of wills. It is a tool, a means to an end. It is the place where the iron bones of the earth meet the hollow bones of men and break them. And like a stern father, war shames men into hating their childhood games. Set 1000 years into the future - Mature themes/story: war, violence, depravity, madness.
1. A shadow of the past

Avatar: Warlords

Several weeks ago:

"Wanted in all of the five districts of the capital city of Yong Da, the condemned is presently found guilty of the crimes of assault, murder, robbery of citizen, caravans and, or banks, destruction of property through the use of earth bending, acquiring stolen goods and bank notes, selling stolen goods, arson, and, contrary to the laws of our fair city, the condemned is guilty of possession of an unregistered iron-equaliser. Therefore, according to the powers vested in us by our current ruler, Lord Shen, commander of his army and conqueror of the desert..." At the mention of their lord's name, several people shifted uncomfortably and the judge stopped for a moment to eye the public, which was plentiful even as the sun reached its dark zenith. Several flakes of ash went carried over by the wind and the judge frowned, shielding himself with his duster coat.

"We sentence the accused standing before us to lay beheaded until death occurs, and, whatever gods he acknowledges, may they have mercy on his soul."

The executioner, a dark skinned man the size of a bull, went ahead to push Sarnai, the accused, on his knees, and when the latter did not bend down, he kicked him down, to which the crowd let out a moan of surprise.

"Proceed," cried the judge nodding. He rolled up the paper containing all the details needed for Sarnai's execution and retreated towards his carriage. A blonde haired woman shook her head.

"Filth, rats, disease infested trash."

The judge glanced towards the execution block where Sarnai waited his death, pinned to the ground by one of the men so he won't struggle. The executioner checked the edge of his axe one more time and raised it high towards the pale sky. A few women in the crowd cheered but the voices quickly died out in anticipation. That single moment seemed to last an infinitude, but when the axe came crashing down, the crowd moaned louder than before, and the faint of heart turned their sight or covered their eyes. Then, not a blink of a moment later, a yell caught the judge's attention just as he climbed the fine carriage pulled by no less than two horses.

People were running away from the execution as if the dead himself rose, headless. It wasn't that. Instead, the headsman lay dead on the ground in a pool of his own blood, multiple ice shards buried deep into his chest. They sparkled quite bright in the sun. Half a meter away was the axe, or at least its handle and splintered edge. It took him a moment to digest the information that Sarnai escaped, but by the time he recovered his senses, the condemned was long gone.

-o-

Part 1: "A shadow of the past"

 _"A millennia has passed since the Apocalypse, a catastrophic event brought forth by the third Harmonic Convergence. The centuries went by and our ancestors began to forget words such as unity, prosperity and peace._

 _A millennia of war and death... It feels like an eternity._

 _The Apocalypse destroyed so much of our world..._

 _First, the very pillar of strength and unity, the former Earth Kingdom, split and cracked under pressure... It was inevitable, as the lords clashed in deadly combat for control. This destruction caused a veritable power-void to be filled with the most cunning, more violent of men, most devious and bloodthirsty, battling over the now divided land, only ripe for conquest. These men became the Warlords, feared across the very curvature of the World._

 _Forced into a corner, the Fire Nation called its benders back to the islands and has allocated a defense budget of world conquest proportions, amassing resources and training conscripts for many decades. It completely closed its borders and adopted a drastic change in its regime in order to defend against these lords of war made by the Apocalypse itself. In the face of such unstoppable and inhuman catastrophe beyond the pall of man's comprehension, what could a nation do if not reinforce itself?_

 _During the height of the Apocalypse, in its darkest days,_ _the Air Nomads have been annihilated as a solitary, independent nation and many were forced to reform into small societies, mostly affiliated with the northern warlords._

 _Nobody escaped the continuous onslaught of War and a dark force tumbled across the world like a plague. It turned father against son, great men rose and greater men fell, all of them vying for military dominance, forever clashed in deadly combat for control over the now divided land, ripe for conquest, forever squabbling and plotting._

 _Such is the state of this world. A perpetual strife to survive, a continuous battle for a breath of air, an endless war for supremacy._

 _It is not a world for the weak, nor the kind, nor the good..."_

The Avatar opened his eyes with a start, and the nightmare stopped.

-o-

Si Wen town, at the hideout of Mister Gold:

Grishma watched the black flakes falling down like snow, but of course it never snowed in this region despite the cold. No, this was ash, coming from a perpetual screen of dark haze covering the sky. She squinted her eyes at the entrance and waved her brother, Javaid, to come closer and duck behind the bar.

"I'm gonna tear that Kwon a new asshole…" she said, ducking lower as the door to the entrance got kicked open.

"Calm down, Grishma," muttered her brother. "How did you know they were going to come here anyway?"

"I had an inkling," responded Grishma nodding towards her shattered bottle of whiskey. The conflagration attack that she barely escaped from has been so intense that it instantly ignited the contents of the bottle, turning it into a grenade. There were many small burns and wounds on her face and arms, but most were already fully healed.

"An inkling you say? So, has Yaran finally decided to lend me a hand, or what?"

"Don't believe that for a moment, Javaid. These lords wish nothing but to expand their power," bitterly responded Grishma. "We're just pawns in a game of fools."

Javaid turned and grabbed Grishma by the shoulder. He hated to see her fall into bloodlust.

"That's why I said to calm down. Can you really blame Kwon from wanting out...?"

Grishma suddenly raised her injured hand, which was already in the process of healing, though she intentionally slowed down the process. From the holes made by the broken glass, blood came rushing out until it turned into a crystallized crimson blade, kept intact by her blood bending. Javaid scratched through his hair. Of course he knew what sort of mentality drove her, and Kwon would soon die for daring to not only betray Yaran, but attack them in their own hideout. She was just like that, the person who would stop at nothing to kill and maim.

"There is no going out, not from this!"

Suddenly she jumped from behind the cover. Beyond the bar, a man with the face of a gorilla, the one who kicked the entrance open, was advancing carefully, his guard up in anticipation. Behind him there was another, skinnier person with pale skin and darker hair. The fire bender named Kwon, who used to work with Yaran until the betrayal. Grishma lunged forward, pushed by an insatiable hunger for blood, but was blocked by a wall of stone made by the gorilla-faced brute. He stepped in front of his partner-in-crime and thumped the floor, sending out spikes of rock propounding through the wood. Grishma dodged them and pirouetted around and out of view. Somewhere close by, a red light came into existence and soon after, a wave of flames drowned the room, engulfing everything and turning it into ash. Grishma ducked under the cover of a stone wall made by Javaid just before the flames hit, but the brute rushed in and split the wall with a heavy punch. As he did so, Grishma jumped high up with the clever usage of blood bending, and attached herself to the ceiling with blood-made claws. Not wasting a moment, fearing that they might counterattack, she bounced back at the enemy's throat. She missed by a hair as the brute ducked down to dodge the cut, but she quickly recovered her stance and kicked him straight in the face. Leaving him no time to react, she grabbed him by the shirt and kicked him in the stomach. He spilled blood through his nose.

"Kwon!" he coughed, losing his composure. "Kwon, help...!"

But nobody responded, nobody but Javaid.

"Kwon just became the most realistic statue," he said. The brute named Tai Zhou struggled to get back on his feet but was kicked again in the chest.

"Don't move a muscle, damn you!" said Grishma, kicking him on the ground and extending her blood edge towards his throat. They were already defeated.

Suddenly he felt a palm touching his shoulder.

"I currently have four fingers on your back," said Javaid, barely whispering in his ear. "As soon as my fifth touches you, you'll be turned into another realistic statue of gold, do you understand?"

The man spoke with conviction and confidence. Others would ponder the words, talk in hushed, unsure tones. It could only mean... Tai Zhou dared to turn his head, and came face to face with Javaid, a dark-haired youth with a dry smile and a scarred face.

"Mister Gold?" Tai Zhou stuttered. His bladder almost failed. Behind Javaid, Kwon stood upright, his arms stretched, agony on his face. He was completely turned into gold, every detail, every part of his body, clothes, hair and all. The last moment of his life, the moment of his death, forever kept intact in pristine form. _What a terrible way to die,_ thought Tai Zhou.

"In the flesh, so to speak" answered Javaid. He flicked his hand and suddenly caught a piece of wood from a broken chair, thrown at him by Grishma. Only three fingers touched it but as soon as all five did, Javaid dropped a solid piece of gold on the ground, instead of wood.

"Then you must be," said Tai Zhou, turning towards Grishma, "you must be Grishma. They say you're siblings but..." He looked up and down at her, "you don't look like brother and sister at all." Where Javaid was pale and lanky, Grishma was tall and muscular, with massive breasts and dark skin. By now, her hand was already healed, so great was her power.

"We're not really blood siblings, idiot," said Javaid, infuriated. "Anyway I think you know what's going to happen now."

-o-

Somewhere in southern Si Wen:

"You returned sooner than expected," said the soft-spoken figure, gulping down a teacup of gin like it was medicine. Almost instantly, his face turned red like a tomato and his eyes watered, but the burning sensation brought forth new life into his limbs, sharpness to his mind.

From beyond the darkest corner of his room, only one eye blinked open.

"The battle barely lasted an evening. Lord Shen has successfully claimed Yong Da."

"He has made himself quite comfortable inside of those walls, no doubt..." nodded the nobleman.

"Comfort breeds weakness," responded the shadow. "The losses were great on his side, nonetheless. He won't hold for long before one of the neighboring lords move to conquest... Ah, and they will."

"You made sure of it?"

The shadow did not answer.

"Yong Da has fallen, and it will continue to do so until nothing else remains but a grave," said the nobleman contemplatively, talking back to himself as if the shadow was never there though it knew everything of the plan. The shadow was, after all, the hand who carried out his will. "The greatest city this world has ever known, turned into mush, emptied and filled with ourselves..."

"It's not what it used to be, not after so much war, Lord Yaran," agreed the shadow. "The walls are no longer reliable against the newer generations of earth benders, strapping young men who break stone like bread, grind it to dust. Zino predicts the city will his' within the week if his son's plans come to fruition and surely I say to you, Zino plans for conquest. _That,_ I have made sure of."

"Yes, I am aware of his plans," said Yaran. He took another gulp of gin. The drink emanated a foul, oily smell. "He has been openly recruiting and kept away from skirmishes specifically for this. Only a fool would be blind to it. Tell me, what happens to you when Zino loses his war?"

"He won't," the shadow corrected Yaran, raising her voice. "He has amassed a large force. Rarely have I seen such potential, and he is a ruthless while still following our agenda. The future of this territory will be good under his rule, I believe," he continued with an amused tone in her eerily-vibrating voice. Only her one eye sparkled.

"Honestly, you're putting too much hope into this Zino."

"For good reason," the shadow snapped, interrupting the lord. "I do what I do best, Yaran, never forget that!"

"And what about Master Arata? Surely we can't ignore the fact that the man who singlehandedly took down Ba Sing Se has taken residence in Yong Da and is aiding Lord Shen."

"None of your immediate concern, as long as you take care of income, keep the gold flowing. I'll do the rest. Within the year, you'll be on top of an empire. You heard me, I said _empire!"_

It almost sounded like a threat.

Yaran sighed, appearing tired and suddenly, much older than he actually was. A long, agonizing silence followed during which neither of them wanted to speak their mind.

"You don't like the sound of that," said the shadowy figure. It wasn't a question.

"It all seems so out there. An empire? Never has there been a successful empire in history."

The shadowy figure grinned from beyond the cover of darkness, showing a set of large teeth. The rest of her face was obstructed.

"I told you. Leave _everything_ to me."

-o-

In the slums of Yong Da:

 _"The world is about to break once more and weeps for salvation. The great former Avatar, glorious in victory as she was, has died a brutal death at the hands of War. The shockwave of her fall radiated out across the world in a brutal display of epic proportions and unspeakable horror. What followed?_

 _A time of death._

 _A time of silence._

 _A time of decay._

 _Fleeing refugees scatter across the barren landscape, the last scions of the noble families who once ruled the Earth Kingdom took arms and became the Warlords, splitting the land in between their greedy claws. Hundreds of thousands lie dead, their mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers with them, entombed in ash and waste. The sea seethes and boils on the coast of the Fire Nation, as the remnants of the world are cast into eternal war. War without end. Even the open sky no longer gleams with light, as clouds of cinder blot out the sun. The harvests are blighted in the fields, and hardships untold spread like a disease, from one corner of the world to this other._

 _The civilized world has been thrown into a perpetual state of disorder the likes of which have not been seen since the Apocalypse, and now the vicious Warlords of stone, rock and sand hold dominion. The world is once again thrown in the hands of War, even in the hidden valleys, crannogs and ravines of Si Wen region, where the town of Si Wen is situated. Protected by the harsh Warlord Yaran who holds residence there, and fierce in their independence, the population must fear for their survival, as the other Warlords come to storm upon neighbouring Yong Da, eager to seize the surrounding territory along with its fall_

 _In this century of blood, a thousand-thousand men will meet their end, but some, not many, will survive and become stronger of it, even in the ruin-dotted land. They will not like it, they will hate the world they have been plunged in, but will survive regardless. Javaid, known as Mister Gold, is one of them."_

The Avatar woke up drenched in sweat. The nightmare of an Apocalypse has plagued his sleep once again.

"The master warned me of this..." he said, rubbing his eyes. The world seemed so painfully bright, so alive in comparison to his nightmare.

What he has witnessed of the past, the extend of the horrors their ancestors have suffered had no measure in the waking world. Surely the wars today still injured and killed, but it all happened on a much smaller scale. In comparison to the Apocalypse, wars today were held between _rats._

"War..." muttered Sarnai, his voice trailing off. "Si Wen... Mister Gold..." The thought of the Apocalypse returning made him sick to his stomach.

-o-

At the "Bloody Coins" bar, hideout of Mister Gold:

The sun revealed itself from behind the shallow clouds, showering the town in its dim light. Javaid was wiping the dust off the rearranged tables with his usual enthusiasm to see everything done and through.

 _Such a jolly fellow for a killer,_ thought the boy Farid as he looked at his crew leader with cloudy eyes and a lost stare. The blankness of his eyes was soon lost to rage and hatred, remembering the events that transpired last night. The smell of blood. Grishma. Ash? Kwon, and the statue of pure gold? Still Kwon. Reality hit Farid like a mace, killed the boy, leaving only anger. He had been there ever since, drinking his sorrow away, mulling his murderous thoughts over and over. Eventually, Javaid put his broom away and carefully dragged a chair to sit on, picking it with only three fingers.

"What's up, Farid? Tell me what's bothering you."

"Leave me," spat Farid in the fashion of troubled teens.

"Don't let yourself be so easily driven by emotions, so caught up in the moment..."

"Like what happened to you against Kwon? You got overcame by the shock of betrayal and..."

"Don't speak if you don't know what you're talking about," replied Javaid becoming suddenly serious, interrupting Farid's flow of ill thoughts. There was a spark in his eye that turned even the aggressiveness inside Farid completely mute.

"Damn it..." Farid managed to say, obviously faking this burst of courage. In truth he was deadly afraid of Mister Gold, more so than of Javaid. "You know me better that my mother," he continued with characteristic mocking sarcasm. He took the drink off the table, had a healthy sip out of it, took a few breaths of air and had another strong gulp.

"Just drinking your problems won't wash them away," said Javaid, "just dull the feelings. I know that's what you want, but you also have to tell somebody about them."

Farid raised his eyes, his dried face towards Javaid, channeling all that bottled up anger inside of him.

 _Murderous anger, so much like Grishma's._

"That somebody ain't you, Gold. Seeing Kwon like that, well, that's a memory I intend on drowning in alcohol first, right before I bleed you." There was a genuine and distinct lack of emotion in the boy's voice, so much that Javaid was taken aback. He knew Kwon and Farid have been fast friends, but to talk like this, to act like this, it was unusual even for a troublesome person like Farid.

"Where do we draw the line, as men of character ought to?" asked Farid after a long, arduous moment of silence, through clenched teeth. Javaid looked up, tried to listen to the boy. He almost thought he had his ear, captured his attention. "When is it not alright to kill...?"

"It's always alright to kill," interrupted a voice, breaking any meaningful connection between the two men at the table. Grishma stepped down the stairs, her dark hair flowing behind her like a cloak, or perhaps a spectral cascade. "You, as a survivor, should know this."

"As blunt as ever, eh sister?"

She merely shrugged, ignoring his tone and grabbed a bottle of whiskey. Then she sat down at the table with them.

"When the situation demands," she meticulously began telling Farid as if humouring a fool, "men of character should not be afraid to do the dirty job, as Javaid did to Kwon."

"Have you asked yourself why did Kwon betray us?" asked Farid. Grishma sighed and rolled her eyes, and Javaid scratched his head.

"We already know why he did it," admitted Javaid. "We knew he was searching for somebody that his contractor thought was in our midst. He was..."

"He was the weakest link in the chain that is this association," interrupted Grishma, "and thus he had to be removed."

"Real subtle, sister!" Anger stirred in him, a slow, dangerous anger just beyond the thin veil of his calm demeanor. Grishma was starting to question his authority, sister or not, and it would do no good with Farid. The boy already hated her, or likely associated her with his bloody past.

"The boy wanted to know. If there's no communication in a crew, how are we going to avoid another Kwon situation?"

But Farid merely groaned and left the bar, smashing the door behind him.

"Do you want me to go after him?"

Javaid stood still for a moment before answering.

"No," he lied, even to himself. "It's better if you let him be alone for a while."

From this point onward, a strange breathlessness characterised Javaid's feelings towards Farid, an unsettling sense that the banality of what he had just said concealed unthinkable repercussions. Perhaps he should have been more empathic, or call Farid back to the hideout. He half-understood, even then as the minutes soon turned into hours, that his apathy, his response to Farid's problem, so innocuous in itself, is what turns good men, wicked.

-o-

By the time he left the "Bloody Coins", it was already mid day even though the sun barely made its presence known somewhere up in the dark-gray sky. The mountains on the horizon were painted orange in the dim light, and a chilly wind blew on the empty street, announcing the arrival of autumn. Slowly but surely, summer was ending though it was already very cold outside. The world had cooled much over the past century, being plunged into an eternal ash-winter.

Farid has been so angered by Javaid's decision to execute Kwon, that he simply had to walk away. His head throbbed though it was getting lighter and the pain weaker with every step taken. He couldn't erase the memory of Kwon's statue being dragged out of the bar. He closed his eyes, clenched his teeth and rubbed his temples. Were those tears running down his cheeks?

"Gold, you bastard, couldn't you have closed an eye just this once?" Farid was talking alone in the street, he realized, but the pain of losing his friend was simply too great to care. Kwon has been his only true friend in Gold's crew, the only person who cared for him in the entirety of Si Wen, and he was dead.

How could this happen? Gold, the crew leader, was a reasonable man, slow to anger and also smart. It was Grishma the one murderous whore. Farid was sure it was she who pushed Gold to deal the killing blow to Kwon, but then why spare Tai Zhou? It didn't make sense, since both have risen against Yaran. That was way over his head right now. He had hoped to somehow talk to Gold, until Grishma came in.

"To hell with this war!" he screamed. Around him, every rock and stone on the street exploded into sand, which twirled upwards the sky like trails of smoke carried by the wind. There was no way for any man with conscience to continue living on like this, with all the killing and hiding, scheming and betraying. He wished he would end it all, but how can the powerless succeed over the powerful? Might makes right, is what Grishma always said, and Farid reluctantly agreed.

He took a sharp turn on the left and walked the narrow, cobbled street until it reached the midway. It was a good day for a stroll through the town, though it seemed abandoned. There were no traces of people on the streets and it was so quiet that his steps resonated loudly on the bare stone. Buildings loomed on either side and voices and laughter came out through the opened windows, the few that there were, yet the quietness of the street together with the death of Kwon made Farid feel lonelier than he has been in many years.

He suddenly heard a noise and jumped, seeing a rat the size of a dog running at him. It was as if the Clock of All-time slowed down to the smallest fraction of a moment. The rat, a brown, sickly looking monster of a creature with red eyes and sharp teeth, leapt more like a frog, but Farid skillfully raised a stone pillar to send the beast flying over the buildings. He hated rats more than anything in the world, and they were everywhere. No, hate was a strong word, but he despised them. He heard that women don't even let their kids roam the streets at night out of fear. He straightened his clothing and continued to walk towards the third building on the right. It was quite inconsequential to the naked eye, just an old brick house that seemed too old, too dusty for usage. But it served only as a front for the arena deep below, and as Farid approached, a rugged voice asked for his business.

"I'm for the Below…"

"Password then."

"Say-New-Palace." The door creaked open. During war, men are often forced to do what is considered unthinkable in times of peace. Some kill, some enslave, some become slaves themselves, and then there's those who put their strength to the test so that different parties might take notice and hire them. Such men would be considered mercenaries and most indeed are, but the others are those who fight in the Dark Below for money, women and fame, and even out of them, some do it for notoriety and the thrill of battle. Wealthy and powerful folk gather from across the region to take bets and hire thugs. Illegalities run rampant, drug abuse, prostitution, murder. Such a place is the Dark Below, but Farid couldn't care less. Above, he was Farid, a hired bender of little notice, part of Mister Gold's crew of misfits, but in the Below he was a fighter, a survivor of uncanny viciousness.

He climbed down the stairs and into the large underground dome, packed full with people. It smelled of burned flesh, sweat, smoke, piss, alcohol.

The crowd suddenly roared!

"Who is fighting?" asked Farid. At the bar, a fairly young woman with green hair rushed in.

"Survivor, long time no see," she said, feigning nonchalance though Farid knew she had sweet eyes for him. Why, just the way she bit her lip gave it all away so much so that he rolled his eyes.

"I've been busy making Gold money, though I think I'm out of that business."

"For good? Means you'll come and work in the Below? Boss Ran might've..."

"Calm yourself," said Farid, laughing. He then made a hand gesture and she brought him a cold beverage. "So I asked you who's fighting," he continued as he raised the cup.

"Nobody important but he's a fiery one."

"A fire bender?"

"Worse, a lava bender. People are betting good money on him and for good reason, eh? There's few other fighters than regular earth benders and by default this guy, this Mabi, counters them."

It was true. Earth benders are unfaltering, staunch colossi. Their fighting style is characterized by maintaining a good defensive position and deploying a few, very strong attacks. Lava bending innately counters a stationary target more so than any other style of elemental bending.

"Hey, wait! Are you going to fight him?"

Farid ignored her as he pushed his way through a wall of onlookers and approached the ring. Mabi's opponent sent forth a drill made out of stone but Mabi spun around, grabbed the projectile mid-air and threw it back. More than that, he split it into several thinner spikes, but the opponent raised a stone wall and ducked behind it. Mistake, as Mabi surrounded him with a strip of lava.

 _Never keep still when fighting a lava bender_ , thought Farid, smirking. Lava benders were a genuine powerhouse but their attacks were all telegraphed, for all they're worth. A nimble and agile fighter should easily counter any lava bender.

The opponent threw himself up in the air with a plateau of earth in order to escape, but Mabi actually sniped him with a well placed shot, hitting him right in the head with a rock the size of a potato. He fell to the ground and yielded.

"The winner for the third time today, Mabi!"

Farid found himself applauding and cheering with the rest of the crowd. It has been a good, clean battle. Many will flock to him. From beyond the bar, Suli waved him to go talk to her. Looking back at Mabi, Farid understood. He was not just a lava bender, he did not merely brute force his way through everything and they usually come, but used it to win strategically. Yes, he did not only win. He won by his own terms, pushing his opponent exactly where he wished, and that struck Farid as peculiar.

"Luck," Suli said with typical cheerfulness. "Mabi's manager mentioned he has been looking for a sand bender himself and he's paying a good sum just for it."

"He's looking to specifically fight sand benders?" asked Farid with suspicion. It was true, sand bending was an effective method to counter a pool of lava by cooling it quick, but most fighters in the Dark Below were earth benders, at best budget sand benders, not pure-blood from the sand tribes.

Suli eagerly nodded.

"Has he now...? That's interesting. Can you arrange me a..."

"Boss Ran is already talking to him," said Suli, interrupting him.

Farid stopped, then smirked and nodded.

"For the how many'nth time are you in debt to me now? Just go, Farid. Show 'em how it's done in Si Wen."

"Good!" said Farid flexing his muscles and neck, casually walking towards the ring. "I need to let loose after that last meeting with Gold!"

He stepped onto the ring and took his shirt off, showing off his muscular, yet lean body. Mabi was not impressed, nor did he look impressive. He was quite short and thin, had messy hair and seemed bored out of his mind. He barely paid Farid any attention as he approached, but Farid glanced quickly over his opponent. Fine clothes, pale skin and dark hair, yellow eyes, thin lips, no scars or signs of a violent past. Farid has decided that Mabi is a newcomer and not from around Si Wen or Yong Da, and has probably trained with a master, as rare as those come.

 _So, we have ourselves the son of a lord,_ thought Farid. _He is not impressed by us, rural folk. He will try to end me quickly, humiliate me through a quick battle, prove himself that we're nothing compared to him._

"So you're a sand bender?" asked Mabi without straining to talk over the cheering crowd.

"I am _the_ sand bender!"

"Let's just get on with it..." sighed Mabi. He raised a hand and out of a sudden, the floor under Farid turned to molten lava. The crowd roared expecting to see him getting burned, but Farid had anticipated this move. He outstretched his arms to the side and there was a huge explosion of steam, covering the entire ring. Out of the steam cloud, Farid jumped sideways and spun around, creating a torrent of glass out of the now cooled lava pool. The glass shards rotated around him and turned into a veritable torrent made of a million sharp edges, menacingly approaching Mabi. He did not expect it. He encased himself in a tomb of rock and sent spikes out of the ground towards Farid. The sand bender raised the floor with himself on it, dodging the spike points, and sent the large cube of rock right at Mabi's tomb. It crashed, but nobody was inside anymore. Farid observed the hole in the ground far too late, as Mabi emerged behind him wielding clawed gauntlets of rock and lava on his hands, and spiked boots of rock and lava on his feet. The heat radiating was so intense that his hair fluttered wildly.

"Impressive," said Farid under his breath. Mabi rushed with a furious tempest of attacks, punching and kicking, but Farid managed to keep his distance. He knew that a single hit would mean almost instantaneous death.

The crowd surged with energy and anticipation. Mabi threw a heavy punch, but Farid crossed his arms, managing to block it with a shield of rock. Not enough. The lava punch has been so powerful that it penetrated the rock shield and knocked Farid on the ground and out of the ring, crashing into the wall. It was total victory for Mabi.

"And for the fourth, yes, the fourth time today, Mabi is the winner!"

"That hit should have break your bones like glass," said Mabi as he climbed down the arena, seeing Farid crawling himself back on his feet, helped by Suli.

"Should have," said Farid, "but I wear a sand armor covering parts of my body and face. Though it's cracked now." He raised an arm and pieces of sand-skin began falling down, crumbling as they hit the ground. His real skin and flesh underneath were bruised and bloody. "It still did quite some damage, your lava gauntlet."

"Outstanding battle," said a big, balding man as he approached Farid to shake hands. "My name is Gausakt, and you must be the Survivor, yes?"

"Pleased. Rarely do I battle such strong opponents," said Farid out of courtesy, though it was still true. Many desperate people come to fight in the lesser arenas for a quick coin, but there weren't that many professional fighters, or truly remarkable individuals. Farid understood that he would have died at Mabi's hands, but he actually held back, and he needed to know why.

"Captain, we have wasted enough time in the Below…" said Mabi, turning to leave. Gausakt nodded ever so slightly, squinting his eyes at the arena where they fought. As it was being reconstructed by the earth bender employees, he couldn't help but notice the sheer scale of devastation and range of the attacks used.

"Yes, I think we're done here. Survivor, I do hope that we will run into each other in the future."

Farid shrugged, and Suli elbowed him.

-o-

Under the cover of darkness, one eye watched as the two men left the Dark Below. Delighted with the outcome, it turned its attention back towards the crowd to look for somebody else, and there she was, Grishma, trailing them carefully not to be seen. The shadow grinned, showing a set of large teeth.

"Amateur..."

-o-

Warlord Yaran frowned, glancing up the alley leading to his mansion as Sergo approached, creeping like a dark stain. He made long, confident strides being surrounded by four of his men, each of them thick-jawed and stocky, dressed in the same dark-green military uniform, each carrying a curved sword. The carriage they arrived in slowly pulled away and headed towards the gates. There were ash-flakes in Yaran's hair, and despite the ash-cloudy sky, the sun shone brightly in that morning so that he needed to shield his eyes with his palm. He needed to see better. Was that defiance in Sergo's expression? A spark, no, a fire burned in his soul. Yaran hasn't seen anything like it before.

 _Does he distrust me, or is he afraid of something?_ he asked himself as Sergo stepped closer. There was something peculiar in the distinctiveness of his eyes and face, both of which seemingly disconnected from one another. When a man laughs, he laughs with his eyes and face, sometimes his whole body. When a man is angry, the emotion can be read both in his eyes and in the subtler movements of the face's fine muscles, as tough they were truly and utterly connected by a set of invisible strings, and neither can exist without the other. But Sergo, he wore a mask through and through. The strings have been cut.

Yaran impatiently waited for the young general to climb the stairs, gently tapping a finger on the armrest. He even let his tea go cold but as soon as the guests arrived, he carefully constructed the face that he would wear today. After all, Zino, the head behind the arm that was Sergo, was a dangerous man even if he claimed to be on the allied side.

"Welcome to Si Wen town, general," said Yaran, standing up to shake hands. Sergo paused a moment but obliged.

"Have you been told that I am to arrive?" He had a soft, almost plump voice for a man so versed in the art of war, so sculpted by conflict. Here stood a soldier in front of Yaran, but the voice was that of a eunuch.

"Oh, I have known for some time," answered Yaran. "What brings you here?"

Sergo took a chair in front of Yaran. He nodded at his men and they left the pavilion, returning back towards the gate, near the carriage. One of them opened a pack of cigarettes and offered his colleagues, and another fired up a small flame from the tip of his finger.

 _Fire benders in Zino's army? What is this?_ thought Yaran turning slightly towards them. Somehow he felt that the sight of a fire bender in Zino's ranks, a man renown for his racial pride and belief that only earth benders should rule and indeed, have the power to rule, marked a distinct turning point in the fate of the shattered Earth territory.

"I come both with urgent news and a request from Lord Zino," said Sergo and Yaran returned to reality, the world unfolding back into existence around him.

"Naturally."

Sergo frowned, taken aback by the bluntness and presumptuousness of Yaran's words, but he continued. He reminded himself of the warlord's short temper and he dared say nothing aside from the bare bones regarding his mission.

"He wishes to march come the new moon, as it will be highly favourable for his new water benders."

Yaran swallowed. _First fire benders and now water benders? What in the world is Zino doing? Since when has Zino recruited water benders into his ranks?_ he asked himself. He'd never known the man to be such a liberal leader, especially now with the recent tensions between the Water United Nations and the rest of the world. Then again, his own employee, the fellow only known as Mister Gold, has a water bender assassin in his own mercenary crew.

 _But Zino?_

"Interesting. Has there been a recent surge in water bender refugees?" asked Yaran. Sergo laughed, likely intending to be disarming, but it only stroke Yaran as impudent.

"Refugees? Who would want to leave their home and come live in this hell we call the Earth territory."

"Fools and madmen."

"No, lord Yaran. These water benders are hired from the Bottle Bulls band of mercenaries."

"I haven't heard of the Bottle Bulls."

Sergo merely shrugged.

"As it should be for a crew specialised in espionage and assassination rather than military strength. Or perhaps my lord should have spent more time on the field?"

This, again, stuck Yaran as disrespectful.

"You jest, Sergo, but is it wise to rely on mercenaries when it comes to sieging Yong Da? I merely wish to see lord Zino succeed."

This took Sergo by surprise and with all his acting, Yaran could see it on his face as well as eyes. Perhaps he wished to test the waters, see how easily angered Yaran was.

"Lord Zino does not rely on them as the main attacking force, but on something far more, I should say, devious. Poisoning."

In that moment, only one thought radiated in Yaran's mind. _What is Zino doing?_

"Zino employing poisoners and assassins?" Yaran asked, feigning mild interest. "That's certainly unlike the Zino I know."

Sergo shrugged, not knowing what else to say. Yaran checked his pocket watch then looked up at the sun.

"General, I don't have much time as I have other meetings to attend to, so if you will hurry..."

Sergo respectfully nodded.

"Lord Zino also asks military support of you," he told Yaran.

Yaran stopped. This was going too far

"Rather blunt, aren't we?" he merely said, but he already knew that the charade was over. Sergo would either have to speak liberally or face the retribution of a warlord. Nobody comes with such demands and hope to leave with peace in mind.

"As you said, my lord," said Sergo, maintaining his dignified manner although he himself knew of the ridiculous situation he put himself in, "you likely have other matters to pay attention to."

"Before I answer, what happened to lord Zino's army? My sources have told me that he has been heavily recruiting, gathering a large force for the sole purpose of this siege."

Sergo became flustered and fidgety even though he maintained a calm face.

"I am afraid it won't be enough."

"You are afraid?"

"I am the general of his army," carefully began Sergo, though there was new emotion in his voice. "I tell you, lord Yaran, we won't be merely facing Shen…"

"Then speak, general. Who has joined Shen in alliance? I swear, the tension is killing me." Yaran spoke in a jovial manner but there was a deadly vibration in his voice. There were no warlords in the nearby territories capable of facing Zino save perhaps for Yaran himself.

Sergo gulped and nodded.

"Rumours say that the Avatar has taken residence in Yong Da and is currently aiding Shen, or at the very least he has contacted Shen."

 _Despair_. Yaran felt a chill as the moment grew long and the silence, deep.

"Avatar…" he said, trailing off. He nodded slowly. The Avatar. Supposedly the old temple has been broken but he'd heard... stories, even folk-tales speaking of a fleeting order of monks who took charge in finding and training the avatar as one of their own, generation after generation. It made sense, Yaran believed, since the wars of antiquity sought to destroy the old world ruled by kings and avatars, and then there was the supposed Apocalypse who utterly destroyed the Spiritual World. At least that's what the old wives tell their children to scare them into going to sleep.

He took his cup of tea in a trembling hand. Those same stories also mentioned that a particularly powerful, otherworldly presence has broken through in those ancient times, not out of necessity for a mediator between the two words, but as a jailer. He took a sip…

If the Avatar would to join this war now, what will happen to Zino, to the very world? Many men see war as chaos and devastation but there's a hidden order in it. Every action has a reaction, in war more than in peace, and the stronger force comes on top, ushering forth a new age on a pavement of bones, as the burning of the field of harvest. If the Avatar is to side with the wrong faction, what would happen to Yaran's dreams of a final, unified empire?

He checked the sun once again. Not long until dark, when Kurashiki is to report back with news. _If she knows anything of this,_ thought Yaran... _Could I use her to assassinate the Avatar? Can I use her in any way?_

"Do you have the identity of the Avatar?" asked Yaran, once again beginning to tap his finger on the armrest. He didn't care to maintain a front anymore. If the Avatar truly surfaced, it would have to hold priority.

"We have received positive leads from our man, Zhubin, and we have already deployed the Bottle Bulls to take out the head of the beast, which is Shen with his generals."

"And once the full moon is up, we attack?"

"That would be the strategy. Our rock benders will grind the walls into sand, and you send forth your sand benders to take from there."

Yaran glanced at the man then, through the chaos of his mind, he smiled. He covered his mouth and laughed.

"New days are coming, general! Head back and tell Zino to ready himself!"

-o-

Several days earlier, in Yong Da:

The man named Sarnai was quite a peculiar person, found Zhubin. Sarnai was the kind of person rarely met in the higher levels of the society, and rarer still in the presence of fine people. He had a sharp mind, true, yet seemed to have an inclination towards more base pursuits, criminal affairs some would say, despite or maybe because of his own skill in elemental bending, fact that would have brought him status and prestige in any army. He was, after all, the Avatar, yet he chose to live the life of an outskirter.

Although quite knowledgeable of various topics of actuality and news of the world, he talked little and showed less. Indeed, he never had his way with words, to hear others say. Nobody out of those interrogated knew where Sarnai came from, but apparently he arrived one say in Yong Da and started causing trouble.

Zhubin believed naught. The avatar, has simply managed to cover his tracks and maintain a false identity almost perfectly - at least this was the conclusion drawn by his associates of the Bottle Bulls, after talking with a select few folk, namely those few with whom the avatar had contact.

"I don't know anything of value about him!" the woman Shufee began, her weakened voice betraying the overwhelming fear behind it. Even before the man kicked open the door, burst into her hideout, assaulted her and presented himself to her, even as she woke up that morning, she had a sense of foreboding, a feeling of ill dread that her cover had been brought to light, revealed in front of the enemies. She cowered on the chair she was sitting on, covering her blackened eye and swollen cheek with her palms, frightened by the sight of her interrogator who bore a massive, metallic bar of a weapon strapped at his back and a much more ominous-looking, double-barreled iron-equaliser hanging at his hip. Upon his big, fat bald head rested a wide peasant's straw hat. He punched her again, so hard that he threw her off the chair.

"Please..." she cried, begged. "He... he's been pardoned by Shen and he's gone now, off with Shen..."

The woman paused and gulped, as if just then realizing that she had told too much. Of course he had been pardoned. He was the Avatar!

She had heard many tales of suffering, to be sure, but then those stories of past heroes have always been noble, something to look forward to. To die in the service of your lord would have been the greatest honour. She would be the pillar of strength and heroism, a beacon of courage in the face of doom...

That first punch that blackened her eye has knocked much foolishness out of her. She understood quite quickly that there was no heroism, no strength in the face of pain, no courage in death.

 _Betray lord Shen, betray the army, betray the Avatar!_ She recited it like a chant, like a mantra. _Betray lord Shen, betray the army, betray the Avatar!_ It was as if another voice sang inside her head. Maybe she will survive. She would do anything, say anything to make the pain stop and the fear go away.

"I," she began babbling, as if to make excuses, "I saw them going..."

Zhubin raised a finger, any hint of emotion fading from his expression. He unstrapped his gun and pointed it at her forehead.

"D'you know why they call these things iron-equalisers?" he asked, looking at his weapon as upon the shape of a beautiful woman. Shufee managed to shake her head in between fits of trembling.

"Through iron, they bring humans on an equal footing with... monsters."

-o-

His flaming palm leads the group of people through a stone labyrinth of dark, thin hallways and low ceilings. An oppressive silence chokes the air and nothing can be heard but their breathing and the sound of steps on dead stone. The feeling of inevitability and impending death was suffocating. Nobody uttered a word. Dust and ash hangs lazily in the visible haze as the silent progression of the group slinks steadily along the path, with the Avatar in front of them.

Lord Shen has accepted the shame of defeat, but the others did not, at least not fully. At least not openly. He looked around from beyond the visor of his kabuto helmet and saw the eyes of his allies. He read their thoughts through their expressions. Here, general Hideaki is nurturing a deep shame of running away from the enemy. He has already lost so many good men and women to Zino's assassins. There, the earth bender Hoynar picked up the pace to match that of the Avatar.

 _Does he wish to tell him something?_

Second general Yuu is whispering something into Naoki's ear. She reluctantly shakes her head, glances at the Avatar and responds something that made Yuu's frown even deeper. Behind them all, Master Arata remains silent. His face is barely noticeable from under his red hood and thick beard.

These are the most powerful, most trustworthy, most valiant men of Shen's inner circle, those that made the siege of Ba Sing Se possible... This is what power means...

 _No!_ thought Shen. They were all powerful, intelligent individuals, true, but they did not make the siege possible. They did not have power! The Avatar, Sarnai, did! He was the mind and muscle of Shen's success. A miracle in human form... And Shen almost had him executed.

He walked in front of them, an imposing figure built like a weapon, sculpted like a perfect statue of the hardest rock, surrounded by an aura of confidence and stoic vigour. His white hair flowed behind him like an ethereal cape of sorts. Even his steps resonated louder.

Shen regained his hope. He stretched his back, took a deep breath of air to fill his lungs. Yes, even the air seemed purer near the Avatar.

"Why are we running away?" asked Hoynar, walking beside the Avatar. Shen wanted to know as well but felt that he shouldn't question Sarnai's decisions. But that's what a weak leader did and he suddenly realised that others must have thought so as well.

Shen took a breath of air and spoke towards the Avatar: "We are not running, though this is a legitimate concern that we all have."

"I'm more interested to know about this assassination attempt. How did you know about it, Sarnai?" asked general Yuu.

"It is because to fight and shed blood is the will of the Ghost of War, who has been controlling this war for millennia," Sarnai answered plainly, for it was truth.

His response took everyone aback, even Master Arata who walked with his head bowed down. Now he stopped and glanced up through his bushy eyebrows. None of them rightly knew what to say or how to react, so they all sat in silence. The reality of this losing battle hit them hard.

"Are you saying," murmured Naoki, "that the enemy strives for war, is that it? That Zino is..."

"Not Zino!" interrupted the Avatar. "Lord Zino is one of the many puppets of War, directed and deployed by this servant."

Shen wiped sweat off his brow: "How are supposed to fight an enemy that does not wish to win, that does not have a goal other than bloodshed?"

"Just what exactly..." Naoki said lost in thought, her voice trembling. "Just what are we up against?"

Yuu decidedly stepped in. "Who is this servant of War that you speak of, Sarnai?"

"Whoever it is, they managed to take out my men," responded general Hideaki, eyeing Sarnai and Shen. "All of them! They killed them all with iron-equalisers," he continued after a brief moment of silence, crossing his arms and flexing his thick arms. "They killed Shufee..."

Nobody replied.

Shen shook his head. "So is it safe to assume that they are using the discord between benders and non-benders as a fuel for war?" he asked. Yuu quickly nodded and so did Hideaki, as if that has been the first sensible thing said. It was no secret that the constant state of warfare and the subsequent shattering of the Earth territory has driven many non-benders against benders, and to perform acts of terrorism and open rebellion.

Hoynar scratched his unshaven chin. "My concern is, if what Sarnai says it's true, how do we fight an enemy that wages war for the sake of war? What purpose could such a needless waste of human lives serve?"

"I have reasons to believe that what the enemy wants is primarily land, and they take it forcefully for nothing, in the history of mankind, remained unsolved by war," responded Sarnai.

"Right, they don't make that anymore," agreed Hoynar, "and war is merely a means to an end."

Yuu stepped forward, again. "Hoynar raised a good point. Sarnai, how do we know that any of this is true? Our men have been assassinated but Naoki's spies claim that the Bottle Bulls, a mercenary party of small importance, took part in these acts..." He let the words hang in the air for all to question.

Shen raised an eyebrow. "I don't see where you're going with this, second general Yuu."

"It's simple. They have been purchased as no mercenary band fights for a cause. They hold no allegiance to anybody other than coin and gold. War is their object of trade but they have no understanding of what it truly is."

"I don't understand," said Shen. "Are you saying that they do not enact a will greater than their own?"

"Exactly. As mercenaries, they could have served us as well as they served the enemy." He turned towards the Avatar. "That means no faceless ghost or god of war."

"It is no god we're warring against!" snapped Sarnai.

"So what is this war?" asked Hoynar.

"So all we have to do is outbid the bidder..." said Shen, completely ignoring the earth bender. Civilised men knew of war, studied it, lived by it. He turned towards Naoki, "Spymaster, I leave arrangements to you. Contact the Bottle Bulls and use whatever means to cut their current contract. If possible, have them work for us."

The woman nodded slightly. From the darkness beyond the edge of light, Master Arata sat in meditation. His eyes were small, dark and nimble. They scrutinised Sarnai from beneath bushy white brows.

"Fools," he boomed, and with a frail voice, he continued: "Let the Avatar speak." At once, all discussions stopped and all eyes were set on Sarnai.

"War itself has a vast influence," began Sarnai as the Master slowly nodded in acknowledgement. At his opposite stood Lord Shen, his kabuto helmet resting under his arm. Hoynar stood attentively. "War changes the world to be something different, and not even it's dimensions remain recognisable. Men are not men anymore, laws are not laws, custom is replaced with the will of the ever present ghost who serves War and it alone. The world even changes its appearance, surges like a wave, rises like the sea then bends down to War's feet like men do in front of their executioner." A murmur began spreading in between the members of Shen's circle, debating among themselves in hushed tones. The Avatar made a break in his speech to regard each individual in part. Naoki looked at Sarnai with those large eyes that the nature gifts some women. Hoynar struggled to wrap his head around the words spoken. Shen stood in meditation. Yuu managed to maintain his permanent frown upon his otherwise handsome face, and general Hideaki nodded in acknowledgement.

Sarnai continued: "The world's hills and valleys, caves, nooks and crannies become something else, a strategic point, a defensible area or an obstacle in front of the enemy, but never are they something as simple as landforms. The demons of our world are rendered irrelevant in comparison to the terrors of war, and the wonders of our world become demons in times of war."

Yuu shook his head. "I should have expected as much."

"Expected what?"

"That your answers would stoke rather than sate my curiosity."

Sarnai carefully regarded the second general. Tall, thin but muscular, shaved clean as civilised men come, and honest with himself and the world. His' were no empty words. His' were no needles actions.

 _He wants to lead._

Sarnai smiled. "Alas, answers and knowledge are both like a drug. The more you take in, the more you need which is why the sober man finds solace in ignorance."

"Such words don't get through my thick skull," replied Hoynar, laughing as if in tune with Sarnai's wavelength of the spirit. Yuu merely snorted and looked sideways.

"War is deception," Sarnai simply said, and at once comprehension dawned upon Hoynar and Yuu. Others wrestled still with the import of what has been uttered. All was silence. Then, Sarnai turned at everyone to see and hear. As if by command, the whole world turned its attention towards a single point, all reality, all matter surrendered to one measure. The Avatar.

"This has all been intended. Even your victory," Sarnai said turning towards Shen, "has been carefully calculated by the Ghost of War."

-o-

Outside Yong Da, in Lord Zino's warcamp:

Like tattered cloth in an ethereal wind, the twin braziers fluttered in the large, hall-like tent. Surrounded by his advisors, generals and war-counselors, hardened men and women from all walks of life, mercenaries and loyalists, benders and non-benders alike, Lord Zino clutched the handle of his ancestral sword until his knuckles felt like bursting. He waited patiently, unconsciously counting his "court". His resources. General Sergo accompanied by a short, young man walked to his right and leaned over, licking his thin lips before saying:

"Yaran's emissary has arrived..."

"Heed your tone," snapped an older, much thicker man. "Kurashiki is Lord Yaran's most trusted servant and she aids our cause!"

The general bowed his head swiftly, as though against his will. He could humble the pompous old man with a slight of his wrist, or the iron of an equaliser to the head, but that would leave nothing good behind. How he despised benders! Almost as much as he despised needing them.

"Kurashiki has come, Lord Father," whispered the younger one, a thin boy with messy, dark hair. Zino clenched the pommel so tight the script engraved across it etched a brand on his palm.

Two sweaty earth bender guards entered the tent, bearing arms rather than lamps. They took positions on either side of the entrance and captain Gausakt, large and balding, filled between them, accompanied by a slender, cowled figure drapped in black robes and loose pants. Despite the fires, Zino could only partly see her lips and her only healthy eye. That terrible, maddening eye.

 _The sun went down, and so it seems, all hope with it,_ he pondered, struggling to breathe. Kurashiki. For a rational man like Zino, the only being more hateful was the Avatar.

She drew back her cowl, pulling it wide over her bony shoulders, revealing a head full of thick, black hair. Her skin was pale, shockingly so, and her face was dominated by the right, empty eye socket accompanied by her other eye, wide-mad with the things she must have seen. Her almost-skeletal face always unnerved Zino, always reminded him of the impotence of man against incomprehensible, unfathomable power. The knowledge that this... woman could nevertheless kill him then and there, shift the balance of power in the Shattered Earth territory, awakened a pang at the back of this throat, one that could not be silenced by swallowing.

Had there been any unchecked anger handy, any unbeaten resentment or temper in his court... Had there been any rivals that would see harm to Zino's rule, any man at all could have seized the occasion and attack Kurashiki in that instant. No man could suffer her, and only stood still our of fear. Pure fear. Such were the extremes of emotion that Kurashiki excited in these people, who were all unaccustomed by her mere presence. Standing lean as a knife, narrow and dangerous as a blade, grinning sarcastically and revealing her large, almost animal teeth.

"Why have you come?" Zino asked. He was surprised at the booming sound of his own voice. Perhaps he appeared disrespectful, but weaker men were concerned with such matters. Zino was not.

"I bear news, Warlord," said the shadowy Kurashiki. "The Avatar, Lord Shen and several of his entourage have escaped _your_ assassins."

Zino snorted. Of course he knew that entrusting the execution of such a manoeuvre to the Bottle Bulls was foolish, but his son seemed to have had faith in them. This will not happen again.

"A blunder, a miscalculation of sorts. I assure Lord Yaran that our plans do not suffer changes..."

"Fool!" exclaimed Kurashiki. Out of reflex or ignorance, Gausakt, Zino's Captain of the guards, raised a stone to strike her down. Zino's son, the boy Mabi, furiously protested and raised his arms in a battle stance, his Elemental Master, the old Payam, putting a hand on the boy's shoulder as if to calm him down. Sergo was outraged, others spoke in tones tight with the fear of being overheard. The whole tent rose in offence.

Zino silenced them all with a thump of his sword on the floor.

"As you can see, Kurashiki, we do not take kindly to misbegotten words in my war-camp."

Her eye lingered for a moment on him, then switched over the two burly men that flanked her. Looking beyond them, she saw Gausakt. In front of her stood old master Payam and his student, Mabi. Sergo had his iron-equaliser ready to fire. In a flash, she counted each person inside the tent, as though assessing the threat posed by all of them at once. Then, like the glare of a lighthouse, her eye turned back to Zino.

"We should have taken the Avatar out before laying siege," said Kurashiki. Zino knew this. "The enemy recruits as we speak, amasses their power, they design plans, form strategies. They have the advantage that the Avatar possesses." Zino also knew this. He can no longer bargain with Shen, he realised. Not after a failed assassination attempt. "And the people of Yong Da wish no more war..."

"I will grant them that trifle," said Zino, "as soon as I conquer their city."

"Don't you see? They know! They know that the Avatar has returned now, at the precipice of time, and they shall join with the Avatar. This will be no war against Lord Shen. This will be a war against the hundreds of thousands of Yong Da. A war against the Avatar himself... A war to end all wars!" Her disheartening grin widened. "And guess on which side will you be, Lord Zino?"

For the first time, Kurashiki saw concern rather than calculation on Zino's fine facial features. Too subtle for others too see, but as clear as a candlelight in darkness for her. Should she disgrace him? Maybe stir some righteous anger in him? Perhaps humble the man in front of others...? Which emotions should she play with?

 _Shame it is..._

"Speechless, Lord Zino?" she sneered. "Well, choke on this: Lord Shen's spymaster, a woman named Naoki, has already sealed a pact with the Bottle Bulls, this very morning, under your nose. Even now, those traitorous benders prepare to join his host."

Zino whirled to face his son, Mabi, who brokered the deal with the mercenaries, stunned by what he had just heard.

"Lies!" spat Mabi.

Zino knew he should be mad with fury but something like this was... unprecedented.

"She lies, father," the boy said. "The devil lies, she works with..."

"Silence!" said Zino, his voice raised to frightening levels. "This creature is incapable of untruth, she never tempers with a fact, never alters a word to suit the pleasure or convenience of anyone other than whom she serves."

A cold fury uncoiled within Zino. There will be much arguing tonight.

"You must forgive Mabi," he said. The whole court fell into a dreading silence. "You can be assured that I will not."

Mabi's eyes darted between his father and Kurashiki and she looked back at him. She didn't blink once.

 _There is much darkness in this boy's heart. Good._

Zino brought a hand to his thick chin. Alternatives tumbled through his soul, of course, but many involved acts of rashness or hastiness, of poor decisions taken mindlessly, most of them foundering on the sharp fact of the Avatar and his godlike power.

"Regardless of who possesses the Bottle Bulls, this siege is bound to fail," he said. Kurashiki nodded. "Tell me, now that we bargain from a position of weakness, what do you propose?" At this point, nobody dared intervene, nobody dared speak up or step out of the line imposed by Zino's will. The evening has been long enough.

Kurashiki grinned and the very fabric of reality seemed to rip to shreds. Her smile brought hardened men to knees, made weeping babes of war veterans. There was an echo in her voice, a reflexion in her single eye and a dark pit in the other. She was the echo of war!

"Leave the Avatar to me," she audaciously said, and Zino understood.

To be continued.


	2. Beyond the end of all things

Part 2: "Beyond the end of all things"

There is something monstrous about a dimensionless world where nowhere was remote, where nothing was kept secret and there was no hidden knowledge and no walls that could not be conquered. No mind that could not be penetrated, no body left unbroken. Something that no rationality could overcome.

Such was the world during the Apocalypse, but men have forgotten, as men inevitably do, the horrors endured by their forefathers.

-o-

 _"Despair at last found the King, cradling a dead woman on his lap._

 _"The Avatar is dead!" the King cried, seated as he was on bloody, foamy mud. "The Avatar is dead!"_

 _An unearthly roar hammered his ears and the King whirled, raising his hands against the titanic shadow that covered the sun. So abyssal was the darkness, so blinding, that it deadened the very light of the eyes._

 _Cries of dismay and terror rifled the air, then a pillar of golden fire washed over the him and the dead Avatar, overwhelming his army. For the soldiers, there was no time to scream. Teeth cracked in pain and heat, bodies tumbled like coals from a kicked fire. The King stood amid a field of smoking black husks, pyramidal, billowing gusts shielding him, staggering those still standing, waved the arms of those fallen._

 _The King rose and laid the dead Avatar on the ground, whispering words that held no more meaning, not during the Apocalypse:_

 _"Turn yourself away from the world so that your heart might be broken no more..."_

 _With the grace of a floating lily but the force of a toppled tower, the Shadow of War thundered to earth, her descent yanking dust and ash into mountainous veils, wings of smoke stretched out like unnatural cascades. The might and dread of War was gleaming in her eyes._

 _"War has tasted the Avatar's passing," she howled for the world to hear. "It is done!"_

 _"Not while we still draw breath!" the King cried, surging with newfound courage._

 _Laughter, like the wheezing of a thousand moribund men. The King regarded the ghoulish woman and shook his head in disbelief. How far could some fall when despair and madness took the lead._

 _"You speak truth, wise King. So long as men live, war is never done."_

 _The King found the heart to stand taller that before, facing such devastation. "No, child," he said. "Only so long as men are deceived."_

 _Her laughter trailed off into a sigh, and into a scowl._

 _"Your kingdoms have been shattered like dashed pottery," she maliciously spat. "The rivers and lakes boiled to steam, forests turned to War-machines only to serve my Master. Will you not end this humiliation? Will you not bend the knee and bow the head if only for your people?"_

 _"So that we die at his hand? So that we turn slaves, as you have become? Never!"_

 _"Those who grovel before my Master shall find peace."_

 _"And it is you who brings peace, Dark Emissary?"_

 _The lights of her eyes flickered. A blink._

 _"I am not a God..."_

 _The King jumped into a battle stance._

 _"Neither is your Master!"_

 _A shriek from her lungs, as deep as the starry void and piercing as the wailing of a beast. A great scythe fell from the sky into her hands..."_

...and Sarnai woke up gasping for sober air, the breaking of bones, cries of men, screaming still resounding through his soul. Yet another nightmare of the Apocalypse. He felt subtly transformed every morning, as though he'd been shown a needed, yet undesired, example of something profoundly _inner._ Insight, or perhaps confirmation, of things that he already knew. However, he also knew that insight was often snuffed by ordeal.

Lying awake in his bed, he dreaded going back to sleep. As they increased in frequency, the prospect of suffering the nightmares yet again seemed unbearable, traumatising. To see the Apocalypse with their eyes would have turned any man into a whimpering mess.

Sarnai began trembling, shaking with a horror he'd never before experienced. He begged into his pillow:

"Please, not the Apocalypse... Please let me die before... before..."

It would be unendurable! He hugged his shoulders and rocked in the blackness of his room, mumbling "no!" over and over again.

Beyond the walls of stone, men and women slumbered, dreaming of glory and fortune in war, and they knew nothing of what Sarnai feared. Fools who confused their play at war with _War_ itself. For them, war was only battle and they could not comprehend such an atrocity.

"We are too weak..." realised Sarnai and for the first time in many years, he wept.

-o-

Beneath Si Wen town, in the arena known as the Dark Below:

"So," he said, carefully balancing his tone between many things, anger, hope maybe, sarcasm. Yes, mocking sarcasm was the very thing that defined him. "The great Mister Gold."

There was something strange with the boy, Javaid had decided, something in his tone and body movement, a certain aspect that betrayed a betrayer.

"What are you doing here?" he snapped.

He had sent Suli, his girlfriend, away and now stood with Javaid in the torchlight. At least Javaid stood, and he did not take a seat, which inexplicably irritated Farid more than his presence. Gold wasn't exceptionally tall, and stood quite slim beneath his fine clothes, too rich, too fashionable for the Below. Save from a tiredness in his eyes and a dryness of his lips, he was exactly as Farid remembered him.

"I had hoped that you would talk to me, Farid. I prayed you would, in fact."

The breeze of movement and energy, of competitors fighting in the arenas, sifted through the dark edges of his hair. After so much time spent away from the crew, Farid found himself struck by memories of Kwon, Javaid, even Grishma. Memories of happier times when he let allowed himself to not be afraid, to not mourn for his mother and sisters, when he let the crew become his family... and he cursed himself for it.

But could he forgive Gold?

He rubbed his eyes, dragged fingers through his unkept hair. Shaking his head, he said:

"You look like a mess, Gold. Let me get you a drink."

Javaid dragged a chair, carefully touching it with only four fingers, but Farid held out a hand as though to interrupt him, then slowly lowered it, at once conscious of his unwanted antagonism. "But you never answered me. Why have you come?"

"Let's say I want you back in my crew."

Farid snorted, but he felt needlessly cruel. If Javaid took any injury though, he showed no outward sign.

"Are you sure?" asked Farid, his expression as blank as his voice. He knew he shouldn't have said those words even before he finished speaking. He suddenly became old with exhaustion and shame, as young as he was. In a blink he had seen it all, written in the language of his soul. He apologised to Javaid, only to later realise that he had never spoken the words out loud. Javaid never kicked him from the crew, from _his_ family, and that made it all the more painful. Gold killed Kwon, but Javaid protected the family. Gold feinted disinterest, but Javaid came to search for him, for Farid, the orphan, the Survivor.

Javaid had suffered much for killing Kwon, that much was obvious, but it was just as obvious that it filled him with newfound power, and a willingness to sacrifice himself for the family.

Hope surged trough Farid.

"I remember you brought me an apple..." said Farid, his voice trailing off, lost in the memory.

"And you haven't seen one before, so you smelled it, and kept smelling it until I asked whether you usually eat with your nose."

Laughter.

"How I used to dream of becoming the spearhead of an army..."

"But your motivation has always been dark," responded Javaid, to which Farid nodded.

"Children like me..." he said.

"Children like you," repeated Javaid, as if it has been demanded.

"We have nothing to live for but revenge, for our dearest, for our family. The horrors of this world is what makes us men."

Though he had dreamt of being a powerful bender so he could enact revenge on those who have destroyed his tribe and turned the desert into a sea if blood, the possibility of working as an agent of a warlord had never occurred Farid. "Professional" simply wasn't part of the vocabulary of children raised in the heat of the desert, within the cradle of its tribes. For him, the world possessed two dimensions. There were good men and bad men, places nearby and faraway lands only acknowledged as some sort of legend, there were benders, people with power, and non benders, weak people. The family that he had always knew, and mighty men from far away, name after mysterious name. This and that warlord, this and that master, the Avatar him or herself though the small mind of child Farid could not truly grasp at the notion of such a godlike figure, and so on. Names and events that added to mystery though were of no importance.

The day Lord Shen's father marched through the desert swept much ignorance away from little Farid, though instead of adding more depth to the world, it reduced it, collapsing it to one single dimension.

Lords were as vulgar, depraved and cruel as the most base of the criminals, those banished to aimlessly scour the sands away from the tribe. Faraway nations and cultures no longer possessed the quality of being exotic and beautiful, but were rather shallow and grubby, men as unwashed as ever and words as filled with lies as ever. Ever the recent became just a repetition of the ancient.

The reason, the rule that made his life rational in his own eyes was _vengeance._

"Before I say anything else," carefully began Javaid, "let me say that revenge only leaves scars. For you, them, the world."

"Scars are all I have."

This gave Javaid pause. He felt that fearful emotion leaking out of Farid as if he faced Grishma then and there. The promise of blood.

"There is power in fear," continued Javaid. "You would drown the world in the sands of your hatred, would you not?"

But for Farid, it meant less than nothing, the opinions and wellbeing of others.

"Why have you come?" he asked again in the steady tone of those whose patience ran thin, and for the first time in that evening, Javaid looked straight in his eyes.

"Yaran is marching together with Zino. I have come to offer you the chance for _deliverance!"_

-o-

To give was to lose. This simple arithmetic truth had plagued Yaran's mind since Kurashiki left in the service of Zino.

 _For the greater purpose,_ he had repeatedly told himself.

Kurashiki has always been the strangest person Yaran had ever met, and perhaps that's why he felt such a sense of safety around her. There was an unearthly hollow inside her, where human sentiment should have been. She had never cried, never choked with laughter, never reached out for the touch of a man.

 _Perhaps that's why she only smiles and grins,_ thought Yaran. Smiling, he realised, was the only emotion that she could mimic. He had once laughed with his generals and captains that she would rather starve than ask for food.

"Maybe that's why she's thin to the extreme," said Samiramis, his Elemental advisor.

"Like a misshapen tent over the woodwork of her bones," joked another, a captain.

Laughter, forced in the way men do at the expense of another, of perhaps a higher status. Deeper, they all felt it, the absurdity of what she represented, and cowered in awe. Where men fought for survival, she battled much more profound demons. Even diminutive as she was, Kurashiki never failed to intimidate men forged in war and made by the hammer of conflict. A will of iron among hearts of bread. She seemed a fish too great for their flimsy nets. Something about her one eye, of her voice, whose flawless edge called attention to the cracks and twists of others'.

 _So drunk are they on masculine virtues, that they can't recognise the immensity of her, like fools who can't see the forest for the trees,_ Yaran often pondered

Not only her utter allegiance to War has made Kurashiki the Royal Emissary, equal in station and politics to Yaran himself, her presence has become a source of comfort, even sustenance. He looked forward to her returning, so that they could talk. She was wise in all matters concerning warfare and conflict and, although never quite human, it always struck him as more piercing and understanding, as if her one eye allowed her to see the world of men and her empty eye socket gave her insight into their souls.

Over the course of his reign, Yaran had told himself many things.

In the end, he could never truly lie to her, only lie to himself that he lied to her. And she would lie that she has been lied. Did he love her? He wouldn't answer, even to himself.

"But why, Kurashiki? After so much blood and fire, why would they raise arms against me?" asked Yaran before he had knew truth, before witnessing war. He was so young then, both in body and mind, and Kurashiki had been just a single eye, always watching from the darkest recesses of his human psyche. He half-believed himself to be mad, talking to nothing but a ghost, yet it gave him understanding and prowess in warfare.

"The well of fools has no bottom," Kurashiki hissed. "You best believe that for every Lord opposing you openly, there are a thousand men and women who skulk in the shadow. The world of men thrives on conflict."

"How I hate this world!" admitted Yaran. "Show me Kurashiki, show me your true face."

Then he saw the fist of her shadow slacken and part. Saw the shadow woman walk without resistance through places where everyone and everything could not, a silhouette so sharp that it cut his eyes sideways, cut into the very cloth of reality and pass through. He saw her eye as though it came out of unseen waters, sun-swallowing dark and deep.

"Be still, Lord Yaran," said the shadow, now turned woman. Her new voice crawled like beetles out of an ancient heart of things.

"You..." he gasped.

"War has come, and the demons of this world will be driven to their doom!"

Then the woman vanished, sucked up like smoke from the opium bowl.

He sighed at the memory, so distant but ever fresh in his mind, and turned his gaze upon the gigantic walls of Yong Da, painted white and blinding. Kurashiki was somewhere deep in the citadel, mantis-like both in patience and predatory instincts, hunting for the demons that would see ruin to a world everyone hated, but nobody wished yet gone.

No, not hunting, Yaran decided, so much as she watched and waited. The perfect assassin.

He regarded Yong Da one last time.

What did they know of giving?

-o-

The mountainous citadel of Yong Da, widely considered the most populous city of the world, was ancient. Built during the opening hours of the Apocalypse to serve as a stronghold against the ever invading hordes of slaves, by all accounts it had been one of the most successful military outposts of the north, surviving the fall of the Earth Empire, the cessation of War and the endless winter that followed.

It grew in size as more and more enrolled in the constant battle against the northern beasts of the Water Accord, and very soon it reached the world's capital cities in importance and strength.

But for those initiated in the citadel's deeper mysteries and history, Yong Da was little more than a towering fortress reaching up to the skies, an impressive behemoth. Massive in scope and scale but buildings, bricks and stone and men as caked in dirt as anywhere else. The true importance of Yong Da lay in the oppressive maze of mines and catacombs underneath, the infinite abyss known to those few as the Womb of the World, where the Apostate Kings are said to have hidden away from the world above that was drowning in its own blood, tied with the strings of war.

Granted, the World survived its end only through the cowardly actions of those Apostate Kings, who became the ancestors of many warlords today, so their names held positive connotations to Sarnai's mind. Somehow...

Of course, nobody alive today knew any of it, only he, witnessing the end of the world through nightmares.

Sarnai led his retinue across a barren hall toward the Womb entrance. Their sandalled feet echoed through the hundred columns, adding a strange melancholy to their sporadic conversation. Sarnai said nothing, concentrated on holding his head high despite the ominous feeling in his gut, the balancing twitches and accompanying anxiousness. It seemed he wore his revelation rather than the silk robes of his revered station, so palpable it had become. He could feel it billow about him in winds that only souls could sail. Immortal attire, thus revelation had been. He was certain the others glimpsed it, even if their eyes remained ignorant. They glanced more than they should, more quickly than they should, the sidelong appraisals of the envious and overawed.

A broad trench yawned before them. Forced to descend the earthen ramp in single file, they momentarily crowded the edge, flummoxed by the delicate question of precedence. Sarnai ignored them, reached the bottom before the first of them had dared follow.

 _As perhaps they should,_ thought Sarnai.

Planting his feet firmly on the floor, Avatar Sarnai strode into the shadow of the ancient sandstone lintels. He entered the World Womb, descended into the company of his long-dead kin, the ones spirited away from the world above, with its fickle history.

-o-

The subterranean cemetery wound deep beneath the ruined foundations of the halls above, level wheeling and spiralling beneath level, making a vast viscera of the earth. The light of his fire revealed an endless series of recesses that honeycombed the wall, each packed with urns or papyruses, some so ancient that the script could not be read. For hundreds of years, since the very beginning of the Apocalypse, the Old Soul had been brought here to slumber, condition itself, learn, prepare... All for the sake of the world above.

"The Apostate Kings were not fools nor cowards," Sarnai found himself talking. General Hideaki glanced up at Hoynar, and he could sense the awe in him, or rather, see it so plainly painted upon the skin, muscles, tendons of his face. He walked in a kind of awestruck stupor, as though delivered to the truth of his calling. For a straightforward, uncompromising man such as himself, there would be no higher cause than that of the Avatar.

Only second-general Yuu dared affect boredom, and he looked at Hoynar with a form of disappointment, or ever jealousy.

Sarnai held on to his thoughts on the legend of the Apostate Kings as he guided the men into the void that was the Womb.

"This is a mad endeavour," finally said Yuu. "I don't believe anyone has been alive within these halls for millennia."

"Perhaps, but know that one can not raise arms against what has been forgotten."

Yuu frowned in the way Sarnai discovered he does when the meaning alludes him. "Speak sense, Sarnai."

"I should," he replied on a lighter tone.

Hoynar stepped forth. "This is about your dreams, is it not?"

Sarnai turned, his eyebrows raised. "Do you know about my dreams?"

"I don't, not exactly, but madmen chase dreams and finding anything of importance in these forsaken catacombs is, as my friend has already suggested, a mad endeavour."

Sarnai nodded. He knew he couldn't glance around Hoynar's uniquely angled mind, wrestle with the beasts of his arguments. He respected that.

"No army of slaves had flooded these halls, general Yuu," eventually replied Sarnai. "No furnace-hearted Emissary of War had pulled down the Womb's mighty gates not had she passed through these walls. The Womb of the World was the secret refuge of the Apostate Kings and no one, not even the mind behind the Apocalypse, could besiege a secret."

"I see. And what are you hoping to find here?"

Sarnai paused, staring pensively across the darkness that was made even darker by his fire. Such is the treachery of light, to illuminate a circle by darkening the world around. His thoughts were stricken by the burning of cities and wailing multitudes. When the wind howled through the hallways, the Apostate Kings gripped the uncaring stone, reminded of war horns. Glancing back, they traded reassurances. Darkness threatens as well as it protects. They had eluded their pursuers. Where else might a man survive the end of the world?

Together they huddled and cried and made peace with themselves.

"There are no crimes," the Kings said, "when no one is left alive."

For a moment, the Avatar could only stare at Yuu. Then awareness came back to him:

"I hope to find answers. The Apostate Kings celebrated their strange fortune," Sarnai said. "They cried out not to any gods, but to themselves. They had survived death, they have fled from the Apocalypse to a place where the wounds could be tended, muscle be trained and mind be enlightened. Here, in the Womb of the World, they have found shelter against the end of all things, and have been reborn, made anew..."

"Or rather, the world forgot them for a thousand years..." Yuu said as though his conscience pushed by an unseen intelligence.

-o-

 _What do you remember,_ Kurashiki asked herself, seeing the Old Soul struggle with its nightly terrors. It had to be asked, for the dreams of one merely represented the memories of another. But now her memory faltered, unable to express its message.

An odd hesitation to act, as though to the syncopation of an inhuman heart. How It raged that night, the way only War could rage.

 _Things, strangers, other times. All of them heartbreaking and horrific._

She nodded. She remembered it all as well, but why it should cause her such sorrow, she did not know. Perhaps she wasn't human after all. How could such a cavernous soul inhabit a human body?

Seeing the Avatar relive ancient history every time the present world was made unseen in the night, it pimpled her skin. She knew all of it, the burning cities, the streets made rivers of blood, the slaughtered masses, the mad hordes of slaves, skies painted in smoke and flame. She had tasted the ash and burnt bones. She had grinned and laughed, her mind uncomprehending...

Yes, his' were only dreams but hers' were memories. This made her unique among men, the fact of her consciousness to have lived the span of generations, flung across the millennia, her life straddled a hundred human generations. She had lived the entire breadth of those nation-decaying ages, from then to now, from the dawn of the Apocalypse to the world of warlords who didn't know any better, birthed from a womb of earth and stone, with no memory and history and culture, only their will to survive. Water, earth, fire and air. Only the elements remembered.

The elements and Kurashiki...

She grinned that large-toothed grin, for she was once in the presence of the Old Soul, the Avatar, master of all elements, another one who remembered, and she couldn't cut him. She smiled because she hated him, because she was awestruck, because she hadn't killed him there and then, in his own bed. She smiled because she cried, because he made her feel whole.

"But no more," she said, extending the arm holding the unholy scythe of war, the reaper of souls

 _I remember,_ the shadows spoke in a pleasant voice marbled with intonations alien to the human vocal range. There was the voice of the woman, Kurashiki, but it was as though the tones of a deformed monstrosity had been woven into it.

 _I remember!_

-o-

For watch after watch, second-general Yuu trudged alongside an anxious Sarnai, Hoynar and general Hideaki. He walked with the rigidity of those proven wrong by circumstance, holding his own hand, pressing the impossible blister of conceit on his palm. Hoynar crept across the ground in the near darkness, his breathing broken by a periodic cough and wheeze. When they'll be through, Yuu decided, he would tease the man for puffing like an old woman.

The sounds of the party subsided, drew out and away until the second-general could almost believe that only himself remained, solitary on a trampled, featureless plain. There was, it seemed, a moment of absolute silence, a moment where every heartbeat hesitated, every breath paused, and the numb immobility of death fell upon all things.

He asked it to take him, show him!

Then he heard something, his instinct and senses taking over as those of an animal would. It was almost too broad to be distinguished from the quiet at first, as if wings, spread too wide, simply became the sky. But slowly, contours resolved from the background, a kind of porous howl, something without a singular origin, but rather born of many. For a time, he could not place it, and for a panicked moment he even imagined that it was born of his mind.

Then in a rush he realized… it was the swift haste of blade through air, and the wheezing, shallow gulps of a man whose throat has been sliced open.

"Behind us!" he cried as he whirled, throwing a barrage of bullet-like rocks toward the darkness, carefully avoiding the dying man. They were all swallowed by the gaping emptiness of the dark hallway.

"General Hideaki!" yelled Hoynar rushing forward, only to be promptly stopped by a slashing motion. It barely missed him as Sarnai raised a stone shield in front of him.

"Stand together!"commanded Sarnai, his voice booming and echoing for the longest time. Yuu fell back and Hoynar, staggered by how close he had been to dying, pressed his back on the wall closest to him.

"We do not know the extend of her power, whether she's a bender or not, and the element she's bending..." said Sarnai.

Hoynar fairly jumped and pressed his back on Yuu's back. Sweat already ran down his forehead.

"Eh...elp..." gasped Hideaki as he collapsed. He held his throat but blood came rushing as a river of crimson.

"Hold tight, Hideaki!" yelled Hoynar. "We'll get ya..."

"Is this the Shadow you have been talking about?" asked Yuu.

"She uses darkness as an armour, cloaks herself in ambush and deception," whispered Sarnai. Both warriors nodded in acknowledgement.

And there she appeared, first as a point that spiked outward, and it grew and sparkled, chattered with incandescences that possessed intensities beyond the gaze's conception…

Before them she stood, terrible and otherworldy, exactly as Sarnai remembered her from his dreams.

 _He remembers,_ and she grinned.

Kurashiki's face was sunken, so that the edges and the irregularities of the skull beneath pressed clear through the skin, making edges of cheeks and pitting the sockets. But, as she stood, she struck Yuu as formidable, muscles like thin ropes on her bare feet, stretching and twitching beneath the skin. She carried herself with an audacity, bearing no armour, no footwear nor clothing aside from a hooded robe loose over her body, carrying the massive, wicked scythe on her side. She radiated a prowess, an aura of assassination and deadly intent, her tone seemed to condemn all humanity.

Her confidence, they all understood, was simply the outward marker of power.

 _Spirits save us all,_ Yuu found himself uttering despite himself.

There was a mad density to her aspect, a hoarding of reality that denied the world the sharpness of its edges and the substance of its weight.

"Who... _What_ are you?" asked Yuu. He knew the stories and legends, of course, but nothing could prepare him for it.

"I am the dancer and the singer," she replied, voice echoing inhuman vibrations. "But War is the one who writes the play."

-o-

Sarnai nearly lost his balance gazing into her perfect eye. The eyes are a portal to the soul, some said, and if it had any truth in it, then the hatred had long ago burned away the impurities of hers, the pathetic pageant of rancour and resentment that so often make fools of the great. Hers was the grinding hatred, the violent outrage, the unwavering fury of the conflicted and the maddened. The hatred that draws tendons sharp, that cleanses only the way murder and fire can cleanse.

If the eyes are a reflexion of the soul, then her single eye reflected a perfect soul.

Their every sinew, it seemed, tensed about their frames, cramped about their bones in anticipation, as well as emotion regarding the Shadow. Sarnai was rendered utterly immobile out of fear, memories from the Apocalypse flooding his consciousness. Yuu was petrified in his battle stance, countless rocks floating around him, watching the enemy intently but stealing furtive glances toward general Hideaki, bleeding helpless on the floor.

"What should we do, Avatar?" whispered Hoynar. No response. "Avatar!" he hissed again, voice lowered though Kurashiki's grin made him feel like a fool, thinking that she could hear them anyway.

Visions of the past cowed Sarnai into silence. All present was forgotten as it should be when the mind was wrecked by the Apocalypse. And it weakened his knees, again, as the Apocalypse should.

His legs crumpled and he staggered, leaning against the wall.

"Sarnai, damn you," said Yuu, whirling to catch the Avatar as he was about to fall. "Come back into your senses!"

But he didn't answer.

Sarnai expected many things, knowing that a day will come when he had to face War as his ancestors did, but he was quite unprepared for what he beheld. Curses filled the silence, both inside the Womb and inside his mind.

"I am sorry," said Sarnai as reality rebuilt all around him. Clarity filled his eyes, strength ran anew through his limbs.

"Concentrate on the task. We need to rescue Hideaki..."

"The fact that she's not attacking concerns me," said Hoynar.

 _Because of War's arrogance,_ thought Sarnai, but he didn't voice his opinion.

"What are we doing here?" Kurashiki finally asked. The blade of her scythe loomed over the general's neck.

The following silence persisted longer than it should. There was a heartbreak in the furtive way they regarded her, a childish anxiousness that made the ancient accomplishments and heroics of their forefathers seem iron heavy, nigh invincible. Men today were scratches on stone where the heroes of old were sculptures! _Sculptures!_

The Shadow shook her head in mocking disbelief.

"You are obviously the residue of a lesser race," she said, pointing at the fallen general, whose shallow breathing brought moisture to Sarnai's eyes. "Why, only looking at Yong Da, and the monumental scale it hoped to accomplish. Even today, half-ruined, there is too much, too much beauty, too much detail, too much toil, a grandeur made wicked by the demands it exacts on you, simple souls. Yong Da and the old world begged to be challenged, overthrown." Her smile seemed to imply that the world today was not worth nearly as much struggle.

"You," she said again, "are a lesser race, one whose triumph over War lay not in the nobility of arms and intellect and courage, but in cowardice, treachery and the perversities of fortune."

Sarnai trembled at the intensity of her words and glare. That much was true, he knew. Humanity only rightly survived because of the Apostate Kings and their treacherous followers, who ran and hid inside the Womb of the World.

"I pondered how could you have survived the Apocalypse my Master had enacted. Old Soul, how did you survive War?"

"I don't know," admitted Sarnai. "It's why we came to the Womb, to seek answers and the truth left behind by the Apostate Kings." His answer seemed to satisfy Kurashiki.

"Have you find any?"

"No," admitted Sarnai, again.

"A shame, because I also needed to know, more for my own contentment than for anything else."

"How did you find us here?" asked Yuu, stepping forward, boldly crossing the incorporeal boundary that seemed to hold everyone else back. He was the one man who did not fear War. He became stronger of it.

"A fair question begets a fair answer," she simply said, and for the first time Sarnai felt something else other than dread. He felt some sort of expectation, a sliver of hope. Arrogance, audacity, impertinence. All of these things accurately described War, but there was something else in Kurashiki, a newness that astonished him outright.

 _She's not the same one from my dreams!_

With a start he understood that although War was the writer of the play, Kurashiki was only the performer. She said it herself, those very words, as if she begged to be rescued from it.

From the clutches of War.

Sarnai knew, there and then, that Kurashiki was simply a human possessed by War, and her original personality seeped out at times. Kurashiki was not War!

He could use this, her willingness to talk, her addiction to her own voice, to draw out a plan.

"When the Avatar escaped the judgement of War, we scoured the length of the world, horizon to horizon. We soon discovered that nothing can lay judgement on those that do not exist and a secret, by definition, does not exist for those not privy to it. What secrets are hidden in here, makes you wonder." She warred against the savagery of her grin, as though not to taunt, not to give cause for the men to attack, not just yet.

"...so I asked myself: _what can you remember, Kurashiki?_ When the world of the living holds no answers, one turns her eye to the world of the dead. And do you know upon which conclusion I have stumbled?" A single drop of sweat ran down Sarnai's brow. He swallowed as Kurashiki's grin widened. Her eye twitched between Hoynar and Sarnai, and when Hoynar instinctively stepped forward to reach Hideaki, she made a hand gesture not to, pulling the edge of her scythe clorer to the fallen general, hugging his already slashed throat as the Father of Death should.

"You shall let him drown in his own bodily fluids," Kurashiki said, raising her voice and pointing her twig finger at the earth bender.

"Stand down, Hoynar," whispered Yuu. Like all veterans, he looked at the world with the arrogance of someone who had survived, without truly comprehending the greatest depravity circumstances could offer. For him, men were children. "Look, the cut is shallow," he continued with a nod. "Why do you think she didn't kill him yet?"

"So, so..." continued the shadow, holding the wicked blade of the scythe at Hideaki's throat. The wheezing of his breathing, the shallow gurgle in his throat sent rods of anger and rage through Sarnai, tensing the muscles, sharping the mind. "Avatar, tell me, what have I discovered as I searched with my mind's eye?"

"The Womb of the World..." he responded. "Beneath Yong Da, the only place humans could have hidden so many ages ago."

"The Womb of the World, of course," she said. "I failed War once... or twice, I can't say, and then you ran away. You ran again, as you ran countless ages ago to escape execution. You utterly disappeared, again! Ahh... there was much strife within me, much punishment."

She laughed but Sarnai and the others felt drained, as though everything had been hollowed. They weren't witnessing a human, they all realised, but War merely in the form of a human.

"I saw you sleep and dream, I could have killed you before! You have eluded us for the last time..." she said in the end, severing Hideaki's head with a single horizontal draw of the blade. They heard a kick resonating through the hallway. Something, like a cabbage, hit Yuu in the chest.

"Keep him," the shadow said.

Yuu had understood then, looking into the glassy, half-closed eyes of the general, that he truly had no real comprehension of what was to come. Yuu the talker, the asker of questions, had died along with Hideaki. He had been blind to Sarnai's pleads and warnings, and the world made him forget that men could die so ignominiously, like dogs skulking into the weeds to pant their last. The image of headless Hideaki simply refused to fade.

Was this the proof that he had been looking for when he joined Sarnai in this expedition, through the very bowels of Mother Earth?

Did Hideaki's lame death made the Apocalypse an undisputed reality?

He nearly recoiled as the stone pillar flew past his head, toward Kurashiki. All time slowed down to a crawl. The pillar rammed clean through her head and into the wall behind.

-o-

Fear was a curious emotion, a form of bodily faith, an intoxicating rush of terror and certainty at once, something animal and original, as alive as anything could be. It ran through body and mind in equal measure, cowering and giving reckless courage.

"It... can't be..." uttered Hoynar. The stone cylinder that he used as a weapon flew through Kurashiki's head facing no resistance, as though through air.

She leaned in tsk-tsk commiseration.

"Come now, little bender," she said. She hoisted her scythe, spinning it with a comfortable flourish and aimed the blade toward Hoynar's throat. "No matter, you shall die here, in the Womb from which humanity was reborn after the Apocalypse!"

 _When was it that I began to wait for my enemy to attack before acting,_ reflected Yuu.

He rushed in with a barrage of sharpened rocks before being joined in by Hoynar who raised an earthly wave. All attacks ran through Kurashiki who advanced with the softness and grace of a silken cloth carried by the wind.

 _When was it that we began disregarding the fallen, forget the dead,_ Yuu asked himself as the general's body was mangled and swallowed by their attacks.

 _Our ignorance,_ he continued as Hoynar summoned two massive palms in order to crush Kurashiki, _is what spelled our doom today. Ignorance and disregard._ Kurashiki walked out of the dust, indeed as though a fish would swim through water. He stole a glance at Sarnai. _Can you forgive me, Avatar?_

"There's no mistaking it!" said Hoynar through laboured breaths. "She can completely pass through anything!"

He barely finished the sentence when her pacing increased, turning the walk into a run, then into leaps. She rushed like the wind, her robes dancing behind her, into a full stop before swinging her scythe at Hoynar. The action was abrupt in elegance, more like the fluidity of a spring than attacks meant to kill. Sarnai raised a stone shield, blocking a second attack while Yuu sent forth a rock pillar to squash her.

Hoynar jumped back and directed a stone fist to catch her unawares, but it darted through her.

Time and time again she leaped in for the kill, dodged attacks or let them charge right through her as though he was made out of smoke, dissipating in the wind and compressing back into form.

Sarnai had no water to bend with, and could not reliably bend wind, so he depended mainly on earth, accompanied by fire attacks.

He blocked a slashing attack with a rock gauntlet and, as Yuu directed a stone spike at Kurashiki's head, he saw the blade fall through his arm, shoulder, ribs. It all moved so slowly, he felt felt, watching the blade pass vertically through his body, and through the ground.

At the same time, he saw the stone spike shoot through her forehead and come out through the back of her head.

Quickly he regained his stance and breathed out a gust of flames, flooding the entire hallway.

"Hot, so hot!" yelled Hoynar, raising his hand against the high temperature.

Through the intensity of the inferno unleashed, Yuu saw Kurashiki slip through a wall.

"Could be that heat affects her as it affects us, even if the fire can't burn her body," he exclaimed. Sarnai nodded, roaring a veritable tsunami of fire. The whole hallway in front of him gleamed red and molten.

"Guess again," a voice called right as a massive scythe blade pierced a wall nearby Hoynar.

Time was compressed to its utmost limits, Hoynar and the rest barely following the afterimage of Kurashiki's attack as she projected out of the wall, scythe in hand. Out of instinct or perhaps pure ability alone, Yuu hurled a bullet-like stone at her as the wicked blade connected with Hoynar's arm.

Everything seemed to stand still, Sarnai couldn't even turn his attention fast enough.

As the blade cut Hoynar's arm, the bullet shot by Yuu dashed at her and it hit, flying through her hip and hitting the wall, marking it with blood.

 _Blood,_ as human as it could be, as mortal, as red and gleaming.

Hoynar screamed, his voice echoing and dwarfing everything.

 _That's it,_ determined Yuu. Sarnai quickly pulled Hoynar aside and blasted Kurashiki with an infernal cascade, but she quickly hid back inside the wall.

"My arm... My arm..." repeated the earth bender incessantly. "My arm..."

"Sarnai, she needs to make herself tangible to mount an attack! As far as I can tell, the action is instant, allowing her to slip in and out of shadows as she pleases. That's the only motion she has that far surpasses our speed and attacks!"

Sarnai applied a fire-heated palm on Hoynar's stump to close the wound and stop the bleeding. His scream was ear-wrenching, pulling at their souls like the wheezing of a dying man.

"Such a power could prove quite useless in battle if not trained," continued Yuu, seemingly ignoring Hoynar's pain. "She seems to be a regular human too... This power may very well allow her to defeat us, under careful use and guidance..."

Sarnai finished closing Hoynar's wound, and stood up.

"Trying to figure how she does it is useless," persisted Yuu although he appeared to be talking with himself. "It would have required choosing a path that defies all reason..."

"As is war," added Sarnai, to which Yuu nodded. Hoynar passed out. "Fighting her and keeping Hoynar safe will be impossible..." Yuu nodded again.

"Fifteen.. Perhaps twenty years of training, and the entire time she would have to focus on mastering this power alone."

"Such is the nature of bending, is it not?" said Sarnai. "That's how much we say it takes for one to master an element..."

"And she can't be older than that, judging by her appearance..."

"War is millennia old, though the body of this _Kurashiki_ is likely not the original War used," reflected Sarnai. "For her mind to be inhabited by such a presence..."

"It's safe to assume she's mad," agreed Yuu, as though reading Sarnai's feelings.

She appeared again, at a distance from the men. Blood ran down her left leg.

"I recognise your prowess, general Yuu," she said, holding her balance with the scythe. "As well as the raw power of the Old Soul."

 _After all that she's barely been scratched,_ concluded Sarnai, looking at her and turning his eyes at Hoynar, who lay behind them. _Not that I expected any less, I suppose._

She hobbled slowly across the hallway to the middle, away from the walls as if to boldly face them.

 _She even knows my name. She must have spied on us for years,_ surmised Yuu.

"The race of men have battled War for aeons. Very, _very_ few managed to wound me..." There was a pause and she grinned. "No game is as thrilling as war, no action as pure as to kill. I have made lament of songs, cries of cheers, husks of men. I have made a barren pit of wombs..."

Sarnai clenched his fists at the memory that scarred his soul and mind. The Apocalypse must not be repeated... "General Yuu," he called.

Yuu looked up.

"Please take Hoynar somewhere safe."

"I have made men murder with both arms and words..." Kurashiki continued, seemingly oblivious.

"Sarnai, you can't. We need the Avatar in these times... I will not let you sacrifice yourself..."

"General Yuu!" yelled Sarnai again, whirling to face the man. "I have no wish to revisit the carnage of the Apocalypse, so please, take Hoynar. Go where is safe, and allow me to end War here..." There would be no more words now, only righteous battle. As Yuu picked Hoynar from the floor, Sarnai turned to face the shadow.

"Well done..." she said after a pause. What she couldn't have known, Sarnai guessed, was the true nature of his bending. Before the Apocalypse, the Avatar would be reborn in a cycle out of every element. Fire, air, water, earth.

"You nave earned my praise, and a swift death," Kurashiki continued, raising the scythe up in the air and levelling the blade at Sarnai's throat. "That is more than could be said about those other fools. Their shrieking will be almost as uncontrollable as their bladders..."

What she didn't know was that Sarnai was a true earth-born Avatar.

"A slave to War..." he said through clenched teeth, interrupting her, "should not talk down to humans!"

-o-

A column of stone hurled clean through Kurashiki. She leaped without prior notice, her scythe extending, only to be blocked by a wall. Sarnai crumpled the wall and waved a series of short ranged attacks. Then he raised a stone fist around her, through which she slipped again, vaulting over the wall he instinctively raised, sweeping the blade in a wide arc. Sarnai dodged and set flying a barrage of rock bullets, Yuu's specialty, each passing through Kurashiki.

Repeatedly, attack after attack, every time Kurashiki lunged for the kill, Sarnai would launch his own attack to keep her intangible and harmless. Again and again she repelled his attacks only to recover with no downtime and jump into a new attack, each movement flowing after the one preceding it, in a perfect dance of endurance, reaction and willpower. No matter the intensity and scale of his attacks, she recovered immediately and moved to counter.

Kurashiki's strategy was quite simple. Keep attacking. If the only action capable of affecting the flow of her martial prowess, Sarnai's mastery over earth bending and the ability and speed with which he reacted to her, could do next to no damage to her, she would have no cause for fear, no need to relent. She would bombard the Avatar with slash after slash, attack after attack, storm him with overwhelming strikes.

The hallway metamorphosed under the strain of their battle, being recognisable no more. A labyrinth of stone columns, cubes, spears, spikes, pillars, displaced rocks and bricks.

 _If I attack from an angle he can't anticipate or can't block, it's game over,_ reflected Kurashiki as two rock walls closed around her. _The combinations of attacks are nigh infinite. I can't possibly exhaust them all._

She went for an easy cut on his waist only to be rammed in the gut by a rock flying at a low angle.

 _His competence in earth bending is commendable. I have not lied when I praised him. What pushed him over the edge, though? The fact that I wounded his ally? That I insulted humanity?_

Sarnai pushed a massive stone block clean through the hallway. Kurashiki phased through it but as soon as she came out, Sarnai closed in the distance and kicked her in the wounded hip, kneeling her. He nearly split her head open with a rock when she became intangible, just a moving shadow running through him.

 _I can't force him to reveal a vulnerable angle. Not as wounded as I am, anyway. Did my arrogance..._ but the flow of thoughts stooped the moment Sarnai grabbed her and hurled her into a wall. The kick was so strong that her head hit the cold rock with a loud crack.

 _Pain. Not the bodily pain, but the pain of being proven wrong. What was my error? Where have I made my mistake? I shouldn't have taunted them, as it worked less in my favour._

She slipped through a wall only for it to be opened wide by the Avatar's bending. He extended teeth-like protrusions out of the edges and began gnawing at her. She quickly turned intangible again but the wicked mouth of stone followed her movements.

 _But every individual is biased and has a proper rhythm that ultimately dictates and shapes one's identity._

She carefully avoided a projectile and spun, slashing his forearm, blood spraying wide. Without much of a thought, he sealed the wound with fire and kept on unleashing attack after wall-shattering. A stone column hit her so hard that it flung her across the hallway.

 _As is with launching a barrage of smaller strikes in order to keep me intangible and raising a wall to block my following move on him, something I have quickly recognised in his fighting style..._

She recovered and jumped off a wall, releasing a tempest of slashing circles, becoming a whirlwind of metal blades. Sarnai enclosed himself inside a shell of rock but Kurashiki phased through it, wounding his back.

 _If I can identify this personal rhythm, I have a fair chance of guessing the order of actions as a reaction to what I do._

He shattered the carapace and sent the pieces flying. They all dashed through Kurashiki.

 _I will find a pattern, a single correct path. To find that one single unconscious error in judgement, that niche in the human mind, is all I need to pierce his heart._

 _It will be difficult..._

She grinned, revealing a set of large, almost animal teeth, and burst into laughter.

 _Old Soul, please do not die just yet!_

-o-

 _Who am I compared to this?_

This was the question Shen could not help but ask whenever he looked to the shield line of the horizon. Men! Wherever he turned his gaze, he saw more and more armed and armoured men.

The great host of lord Zino's army, marching for conquest.

To be continued.


End file.
